{"id":1819,"date":"2018-09-11T11:19:11","date_gmt":"2018-09-11T01:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.midlandexpress.com.au\/?p=1819"},"modified":"2018-09-11T11:19:36","modified_gmt":"2018-09-11T01:19:36","slug":"twisted-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/centralvic.com\/midlandexpress.com.au\/opinion\/2018\/09\/11\/twisted-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Twisted science"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>David Cunningham, Castlemaine<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Trevor Scott, (&#8216;Doubtful statistic&#8217;, <i>Opinions<\/i>, September 4), casts doubt on scientific statistics and instead offers junk science as so-called evidence.<br \/>\nThere is little to no evidence that &#8216;climate change&#8217; has done anything to exacerbate this year&#8217;s NSW or California bushfires.<br \/>\nUniversity of Washington veteran climate scientist Cliff Mass posted on his blog that &#8220;those making such claims are seriously misinformed&#8221;.<br \/>\nLook at the graph posted on the Oregon Department of Forestry website showing the decline in USA acres burned and number of fires from 1911 to 2017.<br \/>\nThe same in Australia, where leading bushfire experts said it was ridiculous to link the current crisis to climate change when the most recent major report from the UN&#8217;s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the world&#8217;s weather had warmed by just 0.89C since the start of the 20th century.<br \/>\n&#8220;If there is any global warming, the global warming is so slow and so small the bushfire event is totally overrun by the fuel state,&#8221; retired Monash University researcher David Packham said.<br \/>\nHe said reducing fuel loads in the Australian bush was what was urgently needed.<br \/>\nResearch by Phil Cheney, a former head of CSIRO Bushfire Research, has found &#8220;the effect of (increasing temperatures forecast by the IPCC) on bushfire behaviour, by itself, will be trivial&#8221;.<br \/>\n&#8220;Fire intensity is far more significantly affected by fuel quantity, fuel dryness and wind strength than it is by temperature,&#8221; he said.<br \/>\nHansen&#8217;s 1988 address to congress is a textbook example of blatantly using twisted science as a political tool. The other bad authority Mr Scott used was Gore, whose movie, <i>An Inconvenient Truth<\/i>, proved to be far from the truth. It was prosecuted in the British High Court, and found (10\/10\/2007) to be political propaganda, political indoctrination, and his alarmist claims were found fraudulent on nine counts. Moreover, Gore&#8217;s forecast deadlines are all behind us now and not one of the predictions made in that movie came true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David Cunningham, Castlemaine Trevor Scott, (&#8216;Doubtful statistic&#8217;, Opinions, September 4), casts doubt on scientific statistics and instead offers junk science&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181,13],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[5234],"class_list":["post-1819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters","category-opinion"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Twisted science | Midland Express<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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